The modest Orionid meteor shower is active for the next few nights in the early-morning hours. The shower’s radiant is near Orion’s Club, low in the east after midnight & high in the south by the beginning of dawn. Bella Luna is exploring the underworld, so the sky will be free of moonlight.

1781 – At Yorktown, Virginia, representatives of British commander Lord Cornwallis handed over Cornwallis’ sword & formally surrendered to George Washington & the comte de Rochambeau. The Revolutionary War Ends

1805 – Napoleonic Wars: Austrian General Mack surrenders his army to the Grande Armée of Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Ulm. 30,000 prisoners are captured & 10,000 casualties inflicted on the losers

1812 – Napoleon Bonaparte retreats from Moscow

1813 – The Battle of Leipzig concludes, giving Napoleon Bonaparte one of his worst defeats

1893 – Deathday of Lucy Stone, a prominent American orator, abolitionist, & suffragist, & a vocal advocate & organizer promoting rights for women. In 1847, Stone became the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. She spoke out for women’s rights & against slavery at a time when women were discouraged & prevented from public speaking. Stone was known for using her maiden name after marriage.

Stone’s organizational activities for the cause of women’s rights yielded tangible gains in the difficult political environment of the 19th century. Stone helped initiate the first National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts & she supported & sustained it annually, along with a number of other local, state & regional activist conventions. She assisted in establishing the Woman’s National Loyal League to help pass the Thirteenth Amendment & thereby abolish slavery, after which she helped form the American Woman Suffrage Association AWSA, which built support for a woman suffrage Constitutional amendment by winning woman suffrage at the state & local levels.

In the long-running & influential Woman’s Journal, a weekly periodical that she founded & promoted, Stone aired both her own & differing views about women’s rights. Called “the orator”, the “morning star” & the “heart & soul” of the women’s rights movement, Stone influenced Susan B. Anthony to take up the cause of women’s suffrage. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote that “Lucy Stone was the first person by whom the heart of the American public was deeply stirred on the woman question.”

1897 – Deathday of George Pullman, an American engineer & industrialist. He designed & manufactured the Pullman sleeping car & founded a enslaving ‘company town’ for the workers who manufactured it.

During an 1894 downturn in manufacturing demand, he lowered wages & required workers to spend longer hours at the plant, but did not lower prices of rents & goods in his company town. He gained presidential support by Grover Cleveland for the use of federal military troops which left 30 strikers dead in the violent suppression of workers there to end the Pullman Strike of 1894. A national commission was appointed to investigate the strike, which included assessment of operations of the company town. In 1898 the Supreme Court of Illinois ordered the Pullman Company to divest itself of the town which became a neighborhood of the city of Chicago

1902 – Founding of the German Section of the Theosophical Society in Belin with Rudolf Steiner as the General Secretary

1915 – J.P. Morgan arranges the biggest foreign loan in history – a $500 million war loan to Britain & France – passing global financial control from the UK to the US

1936 – Deathday of Lu Xun, a leading figure of modern Chinese literature. Writing in Vernacular Chinese as well as Classical Chinese, Lu Xun was a short story writer, editor, translator, literary critic, essayist, & poet. After the May Fourth Movement, Lu Xun’s writing began to exert a substantial influence on Chinese literature & popular culture. Though sympathetic to socialist ideas, Lu Xun never joined the Communist Party of China

1937 – Deathday of Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand physicist & Nobel Prize laureate, who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. Encyclopædia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday

He conducted research that led to the first “splitting” of the atom in 1917 in a nuclear reaction between nitrogen & alpha particles, in which he also discovered & named the proton

1950 – Deathday of Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet & playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, & was also known for her feminist activism. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work

1950 – Iran becomes the first country to accept technical assistance from the United States under the Point Four Program, a technical assistance program for “developing countries” announced by President Harry S. Truman in his inaugural address

1984 – Roman Catholic priest from Poland, Jerzy Popiełuszko, associated with the Solidarity Union, was murdered by three agents of the Polish communist internal intelligence agency

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MY POD (Poem Of the Day)

~O the beauty & terror of it all…The crying of the gods & Her childrenThe red flowers withered in the last golden light…The names of all the Powers shout outFrom the bent blades of yellow grass,By clouds, by rocks underwater, by the darkness in the mouthsOf caves, by dead boys & teachers slainUnder the chilled asphalt, & in the swirling sands of eternity…
~hag

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Rise Up! Life As A Labor Of Love

The call 1st came in as the General Council of the Anthroposophical Society in America was being introduced on the opening night of the AGM in Phoenix.

The date was Friday October 13th 2017. We were wishing John Bloom, our beloved General Secretary a joyful Happy Birthday. I remarked that this date was highly charged, since it was also the 710th anniversary of the arrest & torture of the Templars. * I later came to realize that it was also exactly 100 years ago in 1917, when over 100,000 people in Fátima, Portugal witnessed The “Miracle of the Sun”. *

All through the dinner reception my phone was ‘blowing up’ with reports. But it was during the Prison Outreach Poetry & Open Mic Art Session that it was confirmed: Cynthia Trevillion, long time teacher at the Chicago Waldorf School, had been killed – shot in the head & neck by a stray bullet.

She was walking with her husband John, also a teacher at CWS, to meet friends for dinner. The Trevillion’s were always hosting AWSNA colleagues coming in from Detroit or elsewhere to do evaluations, since they live around the corner from the Chicago Waldorf School. They were only four blocks from home when they were caught in gang crossfire. Someone in a black SUV opened fire on two young men standing on the street near the CTA’s Morse & Glenwood Red Line station.

Just 30 minutes before Cynthia Trevillion’s death, a 15-year-old boy was also shot a few blocks away.

To announce this news after hearing the poetry from the Anthroposophical Prison Outreach Program, some on death-row for murder, was significant. Together we did the eurythmy Hallelujah, which we continued to offer throughout the conference.

We pondered the hidden karma of this ‘perfect storm’: the ‘auspicious’ date; the connection between these seemingly unrelated individualities; was Cynthia helping these young men in death as she had helped her students in life? Why the head & neck? What could this mean for her next life? And what of her death stars? – The particular cosmic configuration at the time of her passing held the dramatic picture of a pre-dawn alignment of Regulus, the ‘Kingly Star’ at the heart of Leo the Lion, sitting in the upturned chalice of the waning crescent moon; with Venus & Mars on the horizon!

This is the “Grail Moon” which Rudolf Steiner references: “…the name of the Grail is found in the stellar script…in the gold-gleaming sickle of the moon…the dark part of the moon emerges…and there, in occult writing…is to be found the name of Parsifal.“

“…what we see at rest in the golden vessel of the moon is actually the spiritual power of the Sun…it appears to us as the bearer of the Sun-Spirit…within the moon’s vessel in the form of the wafer-like disc.”*

So much to contemplate, as we send Cynthia our love in her journey now in the life between death & a new birth; for this is a big part of the practical work of Anthroposophy, to connect the living with the ‘so-called-dead’ – to Enter the Spiritual World consciously – To take to heart the words we heard on the morning of Friday the 13th from of the Guardian at the Threshold; “The Gate is Opened”.

Back home in Chicago, there have been various memorials at the beach & a local restaurant. The vigil & wake were conducted at the Christian Community Church. The school canceled classes so students, teachers & staff could attend the service. CWS will also host a ‘Celebration of Cynthia’ where we will be sure to have plenty of wholesome food, as Cynthia was a proponent of the Weston A. Price, Wise Traditions Diet. I will miss exploring the alchemy of a good bone-broth, the merits of cultured butter & trading batches of sauerkraut with this dear friend. But I will stay connected with her through my Thresholds work. The Central Regional Council has been working with this theme for the last year in our “Bridging Project: Between Life & Death – From Soul to Soul”.

Through Spiritual Science I am consoled by the thought that a death in the physical world is a birth in the Spiritual World. Cynthia is strongly held by many communities around the world, as she was at this year’s AGM, giving a deeper dimension to the title: “Rise Up! Life as a Labor of Love”.

~Hazel Archer-Ginsberg Reverse Ritual – Understanding Anthroposophy Through the Rhythms of the Year

Festivals Coordinator & Council Member of The Rudolf Steiner Branch Chicago and the Central Regional Council of The Anthroposophical Society

October 13th 1307 – Hundreds of Templars in France are simultaneously arrested by agents of Phillip the Fair, to be later tortured into a “confession” of heresy. Once freed of the Inquisitors’ torture, many Templars recanted their confessions. Some had sufficient legal experience to defend themselves in the trials, but in 1310 Philip blocked this attempt, using the previously forced confessions to have dozens of Templars burned at the stake in Paris. With Philip threatening military action unless the pope complied with his wishes, Pope Clement finally agreed to disband the Order, citing the public scandal that had been generated by the confessions. At the Council of Vienne in 1312, he issued a series of papal bulls, which officially dissolved the Order. As for the leaders of the Order, the elderly Grand Master Jacques de Molay, who had confessed under torture, retracted his confession & insisted on his innocence. But he was declared guilty of being a relapsed heretic & was sentenced to be burnt at the stake in Paris on 18 March 1314. De Molay reportedly remained defiant to the end, calling out from the flames that both Pope Clement & King Philip would soon meet their end. Pope Clement died only a month later, & King Philip died in a hunting accident before the end of the year

October 13th 1917 – The “Miracle of the Sun” is witnessed by an estimated 100,000 people in the Cova da Iria in Fátima, Portugal. The people had gathered because the 3 shepherd children, who originally claimed to have seen Our Lady of Fátim, had predicted that at high noon the lady who had appeared to them several times would perform a great miracle. According to many witnesses, after a period of rain, the dark clouds broke & the sun appeared as an opaque, spinning disc in the sky. It was said to be significantly duller than normal, & to cast multicolored lights across the landscape, the people, & the surrounding clouds. The sun was then reported to have careened towards the earth before zig-zagging back to its normal position. Witnesses reported that their previously wet clothes became “suddenly & completely dry, as well as the wet & muddy ground that had been previously soaked because of the rain that had been falling.” According to reports, a panorama of visions, including those of Jesus, Our Lady of Sorrows, & of Saint Joseph blessed the people. The event lasted approximately ten minutes

from: Christ and the Spiritual World, The Search for the Holy Grail By Rudolf Steiner

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Gustav Klimt

An All SoulsFestival & a Lecture by Andrei Onegin on occasion of The 100th Anniversary of The October Bolshevik Revolution

Sunday October 29th 2017 Doors open at 1:30 pm – Program begins promptly at 2 pm

Hallelujah in Eurythmy for Cynthia Trevillion & all our Beloved across the Threshold

Overcoming Human Instincts with the Help of Spiritual Science by Andrei Onegin

3 pm – break

3:30pm – a Bridging Between Life & Death from Soul to Soul

~ Group Eurythmy with Elena Baba

~ Circle of Remembrance

~ Artistic rendering of the Calendar of the Soul Verse #30

~ Questions to the Universe – A Social Exercise

~ Open Community Conversation – The idea was shared at our 1st ‘Open Conversation’ in Sept. to meet once a month to share biographies of great Chicagoans & to further our connection the Elderberries Initiative.

Close – 5 pm, Snacks & Social Time

To Add Your Dearly Departed to the list of those to be Remembered, Please contact Hazel Archer-Ginsberg Hazel@ReverseRitual.com